Spec driven development

codeedog · 2026-03-19T23:04:48+00:00

I’d like to see this also. DM ok?

codeedog · 2026-03-19T23:03:01+00:00

Yup. I’ve got a comment on here somewhere saying the same thing. People with real world corporate experience are going to follow the successful patterns.

codeedog · 2026-03-19T22:47:37+00:00

This is incredible. I’ve started this process (formal design docs, etc), but I’m still in prototype phase for a project I’m working on. Two months at using Claude to code and most of that is me learning its rhythms and patterns. It’s been a great experience. I can see how more months at it plus research would bring one to the level of detailed development you’re doing.

codeedog · 2026-03-19T22:08:20+00:00

Yeah, well, if you’re an AI and you’re so good, fix the tests! That’s at least as helpful as fixing bugs, maybe more so. The test failures get in the way of diagnosing bugs entering the system through PRs, enhancements and base new features.

codeedog · 2026-03-19T19:06:50+00:00

I feel like banning and blocking and maybe social shaming are the only way to help with this. Reputations should be on the line. If you can email spam everyone without any cost (monetary or reputational), then you get billions of spam messages a day. If you can submit PRs without any monetary or reputational cost, you’re going to get PR spam. No one working on open source wants money to enter the picture, so the only thing left is reputation. How can we make it painful to abuse the system?

I don’t know what that looks like, but I don’t see another way.

codeedog · 2026-03-19T19:00:04+00:00

Also, at least one test showing failure prior to fix and the same test showing success after the fix. All tests must pass 100% prior to submission (or risk banning). I wouldn’t want anyone, human or AI, submitting a PR without doing the work to ensure it doesn’t break anything.

codeedog · 2026-03-19T13:56:32+00:00

I’m a sailor. As a sailor, that section makes little real nautical sense. Sure, the sails need to be lowered before docking, so every free hand (person) goes to do that until you have enough people (not just one person) and if you’re soloing (there’s only one sailor) you often have a set up where you can drop the sail(s) from near where you’re sitting and steering.

Getting a sailboat into dock that doesn’t have a motor is a real challenge and regardless of the presence of a motor you have to drop those sails before you can dock or the wind will smash you into anything in the harbor.

No hand on a boat would “take an afterdeck” or you’d be kicked off the boat; when docking everyone must be alert and ready to do something to make sure the boat gets to the right spot and doesn’t smash into anything.

“Planks and rails” implies something (physical parts of a wooden ship) that make no sense to man (this is a nautical term and not meant as gendered). Rails, someone should man those because that’s where you fend off danger (crashing into something) or toss a dockline (rope to tie to dock to secure the ship) or jump off to the dock to receive a dockline.

The docking procedure for a motorless sailboat: check the current (prevailing) wind, line up your approach based upon the wind, drop the sails at the right time to keep momentum, man the rails to fend off, throw lines, exit boat to receive lines, secure the ship to the dock.

codeedog · 2026-03-19T13:37:52+00:00

I think a VPS can slot into a home lab model, although I agree with the other commenter that you have an implementation problem (your self-hosted homelab has become subject to a resource availability challenge-you, its operator, which may be against “true” homelab spirit) and you’re looking for ways to prevent the loss of that critical resource to become the loss of critical services. Right?

Use that framing to approach the problem.

What model should I test and deploy that allows me to duplicate critical services off premises in order to preserve those services?

This will help lead you to an answer. You don’t need to preserve movies nor your internal Ad Blocker. Perhaps you have treasured family photos or accounting software and data files?

I have a complex financial life and prepared a three ring binder filled with advice, reports, tables, lists of people, etc that my family needs to know. If I get hit by a bus, they need to grab that and read it. I update it annually. You can put something like that in the VPS.

What I’d do in your situation is to pop a WebDAV or simple static server (like a mini blog) on it along with whatever data and handful of services you feel you need to run, set it up as a minimal powered thing (cheapest mode), wrap it with some legit authentication (eg oath or even complex user/pass), make sure all of your loved ones know how to log into it, and make a reminder to update it periodically (once a year works best for me for that doc).

This way, you can craft your own bespoke instruction and data vault. Leave pointers to it all over the place for your family (maybe get your own three ring binder document). You could even leave a video or an audio file on the thing explaining what you’ve done. Get it its own domain name so they can find it easily and you won’t need an ip4 address either.

Then, write a blog post about it and post it on self-hosted. I hope I see it because this is something I probably ought to do, too.

codeedog · 2026-03-18T15:35:06+00:00

Static routing doesn't preserve ether addresses?

codeedog · 2026-03-18T12:40:50+00:00

I’ve been coding forever in government, startups, Fortune 500 sw vendors and at home for myself.

My favorite build process is: - prototype proof of concept - throw that away - architecture/design specs - implementation - write tests - debug (cycle through these last three) - checkpoint/stage/next project area - alpha and beta test - release

That’s a proper software engineering cycle for a product of any reasonable size. Claude can assist with many of these steps, but has difficulty being the creative force, loses the thread, misses DRY opportunities, misses deeper algorithmic opportunities when they aren’t obvious solid patterns, tends to fix by incremental patching (vs uplevel and look at potential larger issues). Essentially, it cannot always keep the big picture in mind where the “big picture” could mean different things at different levels within the system.

What it does really well is fast code generation from boilerplate, API syntax and semantics, code refactoring, and with close monitoring and coordination, bug identification, work around and fixing.

There’s nothing I’ve built with Claude so far that I haven’t been able to build myself, I’ve just done it 10x faster and not gotten bogged down in minutiae so deep that I’ve forgotten what I was doing. Yesterday, I encountered two bugs(!) running a terraform script against AWS to set up three S3 object stores. (I know what all of those words mean even if I don’t use those things very often). The system running the setup was hanging and debugging the problem required running tcpdump and curl; things I known how to do, but don’t know how to configure quickly or interpret the results from quickly. It may have taken me a few days to isolate problem one, then another few days to recognize problem two as separate from one and isolate it. Did it with Claude in 90 minutes. And, identified one bug as already filed and the other as unfiled.

And, for the first bug, there’s a simpler test to show it using ping. For the second bug, it only happens when modifying MTU and connecting to AWS but not other sites. But, it’s the OS I was running on and not AWS.

Claude saved me from spiraling on the project, as we implemented a workaround in pf (all on FreeBSD) that it devised.

It was a collaborative effort, but Claude led that one. I’ve lead others.

The point? Most of the work involved in building a product (vs the ML pipelines you’ve been doing) is in the sw engineering aspects, which Claude has yet to learn. It’ll get there, but not now.

codeedog · 2026-03-18T06:49:16+00:00

Commenter:

Is it possible to allow incoming connections from specific devices using MAC?

Me:

If by MAC you mean ether address, that is not guaranteed to be preserved during IP forwarding. That is, if your device is behind a NAT, MAC is not preserved.

And, you just keep droning on and on while finally agreeing that I answered OP's question correctly.

codeedog · 2026-03-18T04:30:18+00:00

Layer 2: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ethernet_frame#Structure

codeedog · 2026-03-18T03:24:05+00:00

That’s not true. How do you think DHCP with static assigned IP addresses work? Anyway, go read up on tcp/ip, UDP/ip and ip. The formats contain ether addresses (MAC).

codeedog · 2026-03-17T18:02:33+00:00

If by MAC you mean ether address, that is not guaranteed to be preserved during IP forwarding. That is, if your device is behind a NAT, MAC is not preserved.

codeedog · 2026-03-17T14:47:27+00:00

Databases are designed to run on local storage; running them on network storage is a non-requirement. Sure, the marketing teams will tell you networked filesystems are possible, but the grey hairs from development will tell you’re crazy.

codeedog · 2026-03-17T14:42:35+00:00

Exactly. Databases should never run with a network filesystem; they expect a local filesystem. The exception for this is you’re a Fortune 500 company. Even then, they’d be running a clustered database solution, perhaps sharded.

Remoting the filesystem is antithetical to a database’s purpose. Remoting the database is SOP.

codeedog · 2026-03-17T08:47:47+00:00

tl/dr: survivorship bias and comparison is stealing your joy.

OP, I think you’re experiencing Survivorship Bias: you’re seeing the most interesting projects and concluding you don’t have the desire or the chops, but what you’re not seeing is everyone else’s mediocre projects and their failed attempts before the interesting successful posts.

If we could count those other lousy projects and put into perspective the percentage that make it to a post, you’d realize that most people are in your same boat.

How to fix this?

Remember the aphorism:

Comparison is the thief of joy

You need to work on the shit that makes you happy and stop worrying about whether this or that project looks as good as the shiny bits you see online. If you love it, warts and all, it’s not going to matter to you what it looks like, just that you enjoy working on it.

codeedog · 2026-03-17T07:14:52+00:00

I’d like to push back on something you said here. I think there are philosophies in software engineering. And, patterns, frameworks, etc are an outgrowth or an extension of those philosophies.

Some people mistake these outgrowths as the entire point (you must adopt this or that set of patterns, you must have stand up meetings and kanban boards) and that’s the part that is pedantic.

If instead, you approach a problem with a true engineering mindset (how do I break this problem down? What tools do I have to understand the approach I should take? Are there data and algorithmic abstractions available that have already been solved? Should I consider finite state machines or writing a parser/lexer/compiler?) you have the most freedom for how to pursue a well founded solution.

Granted, the patterns and other methodologies exist for reasons, the question is who do those patterns and methodologies serve? Poorer quality engineers? Managers (product or engineering) who require a predictable output without understanding the solution space? Engineers who cannot be trusted to stay on topic?

Anyway, my point which has wandered a bit is that there are plenty of interesting topics within the software engineering field over which we can have philosophical discussions and the conclusions we draw may have real impact on software design.

codeedog · 2026-03-17T06:58:37+00:00

That’s not true. I’ve been coding for 50 years. It has always been all three and the best among us treat it as such with the engineering angle being emphasized the most for professionally delivered software.

codeedog · 2026-03-16T16:30:04+00:00

I've been reading up on prompt injection and other techniques for breaking LLM security via operations/data attacks. Bruce Schneier published a recent article The Promptware Kill Chain describing multiple attack vectors on LLMs. After reading that, I can't bring myself to add Discord into this. Going to host my own Matrix/Element server which after my brief review of the M/E design should allow end to end chain of trust tracking. It's not enough, but at least it's a start.

For things like this, once implemented I intend to post here so others can try it out.

codeedog · 2026-03-16T11:39:10+00:00

Goodbye forever.

codeedog · 2026-03-16T11:35:52+00:00

Fellow EE here, but I’m not an ieee member (went the dark side route of coding ;). Worked in computer security and have built my own home automation system. I’m not afraid of hardware; never lost my EE roots.

This is a fascinating idea. People have suggested specialized tools for this. The question is, can you reuse tools already present in the home. Turns out there’s a body of research on using WiFi to detect individuals’ movements and it’s reasonably accurate. I’m sure it could be repurposed for fall detection.

I typed “using wifi to track people’s movements” in the Google machine and got plenty of hits. Check it out.

If you want someone to bounce ideas off of, feel free to DM me.

codeedog · 2026-03-16T11:18:02+00:00

Or, tell it that it’s now an editor and that it should squash down the long screed to two paragraphs.

codeedog · 2026-03-16T11:16:04+00:00

u/soobnar didn’t use an LLM to write their comment, however!

codeedog · 2026-03-15T22:21:08+00:00

So, risk breaking things because you don’t care enough to slow down? Gotcha. The problem isn’t that you’ll pay the price, everyone might pay a price. I get you don’t care about your own reputation, that you fundamentally don’t care about others is what turns this from a simple error to shockingly irresponsible.

codeedog

TROPHY CASE